Gender Disparity at College
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Anonymous
My bosses daughter went to Auburn to become a teacher. She liked her time there. Students "dress" for football games. She came from an average middle America family. |
Anonymous
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I was all excited but then I checked out the two primary colleges my DS is considering. Both have more men than women. Stem oriented state flagships. Bummer.
My DS is a quiet kid. He’s not going to be able to compete with outgoing guys. He could have used a gender imbalance boost breaking his way. |
Anonymous
I’ve noticed that some of the most unbalanced schools are located in major cities (UCLA, NYU). I suspect it works because there are plenty of non-students in the dating pool. At an isolated campus like Penn State or UIUC the dating pool and the student body are essentially the same. |
Anonymous
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Men and women both benefit from learning alongside each other. If we wanted our kids in single-sex enviros we would have picked a women's college.
This just makes me feel bad for my DD and her friends. They are being robbed of the college experience they should be having and dating true peers. |
Anonymous
| At the LACs I toured, majority of non-recruited athlete men were gay according to male tour guide (who was also gay). My daughter doesn't want to date only athletes, although many of them are queer now too. |
Anonymous
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In Singapore, the government deliberately combined some male-dominated degree programs with some female-dominated degree programs at one of the universities to try to balance the genders somewhat. It mostly works, too.
Small LACs are fine for pre-med/pre-law, but often do not offer engineering and that pushes the gender ratios towards women. By the same token, smaller colleges that are narrowly STEM-focused (especially engineering focused) such as RIT, RPI, WPI, or Olin have the opposite issue - gender ratio biased towards men. Given the high and sustained demand for undergraduate engineering programs, maybe some LACs should open engineering programs. |
Anonymous
| Go to an ivy or similar, they are all close to 50-50. |
Anonymous
| A LAC with a strong CS and Math program could pretty easily add a BS degree in Computer Engineering and a BS in CyberSecurity without adding an entire engineering program. That would require some lab space and adding some faculty to teach the hardware-specific courses, but they almost certainly would be able to improve gender balance and make it work financially. |
Anonymous
LACs aren’t trade schools. |
Anonymous
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Whatever did men do when universities were predominantly male? Maybe we can learn from that. They certainly didn't rally for some of their classmates to lose their spots in college so that the dating opportunities in campus would be better. At Harvard, the men dated and later married women from Wellesley and Lesley. But they would never have thought that Harvard should change its admissions so that college boys could find easier dates on campus.
I'd suggest the same now. If your daughter is at a university now and frustrated at not having as many boys on campus, ask her which of her classmates she would wish hadn't been admitted to the university (and have the academic and professional opportinites) in order to provide a more readily available dating life. In my view, college is a time for personal growth, building strong academic and preprofessional skills, and hopefully building a friendship group that may last a lifetime. But gone are the days that women or men go to college to find a spouse and settle down. "Mrs." degrees are a think of the past. So I don't think it makes too much of a difference whether the gender numbers are equal. I'm a mom of a boy and a girl, both in college. And for girls who are complaining they can't find a boyfriend as a result of boys not making it through admissions process, I'd advise they aim higher. |
Anonymous
The ivies can maintain a 50-50 ratio because they have enough male and female applicants for their limited spots. Once you go below the T-20’s, the gender ratio becomes more lopsided. |
Anonymous
If 60% of the bachelor degrees are awarded to women, I hope you are fine if your daughter will marry a plumber, not that there’s anything wrong with that line of work. It’s not the 70s and dating patterns between men and women are also different. The admission process with less weight on testing and more on grades favors women, and you can’t really say one is more objective than the other. When the percentages were reversed there was a concerted effort to bring more women into higher education, but now there’s a prevailing thought that ment don’t go to college because they are simply not capable, they face no gender specific obstacles and there’s no problem with it. In my view that’s shortsighted, it’s bad for society as a whole. |
Anonymous
| Part of the problem is that so many guys are all applying for the same programs -- i.e., business and engineering. So it's hard for colleges to balance their classes because they need/want students in all schools/departments. That's why it doesn't always help to be a male applicant at a gender imbalanced school. A guy applying to Georgetown who wants to be a business major isn't going to get a bump. If he wants to study English, however, that's a different story. |
Anonymous
And they also have a high percentage of LGBTQ students. If your child is waiting to date and straight- there will not be a robust dating pool at T10 schools. |
Anonymous
Exactly, thus those that care about ratios need to pick an ivy or other elite. |